Critical gaps exist in our nation's ability to anticipate, detect and respond to epidemics that may be ‘natural’ or that which may be attributed to bioterrorism due to ineffective disease surveillance and fragmented information systems. Federal, state, and local agencies urgently need (i) surveillance capabilities to accelerate time-to-detection and monitor preparedness at the local level, and (ii) integrated information solutions that enable rapid statistical analyses and facilitate investigations.
Surveillance systems should monitor the health of the population in real time and on a continuous basis. Many disease agents offer only a brief window between exposure and the onset of symptoms. In addition, many agents, like anthrax, cannot be successfully treated once the condition has become advanced but can be treated if caught early. Thus, the window of time during which effective intervention is possible can be very narrow. In order to facilitate rapid responses, surveillance systems must be capable of monitoring information on an ongoing basis. In order to intervene successfully to treat existing infections and prevent the onset of new ones, health surveillance systems should provide a continuous, real-time (or as near real-time as possible), and accurate overview of a population's health. Monitoring, and following up individuals who present themselves at healthcare facilities in both the emergency and the routine setting, and monitoring the results of laboratory and radiological investigations, routine hospital census information and autopsy reports of unexplained deaths would help accomplish this in real life.
Information systems that integrate data collected over multiple healthcare facilities and large populations enable dedicated public health analyst(s) at the Health Departments to attach significance to seemingly disparate events, and subsequently recognize the occurrence of a biological event far earlier than if it were done on an individual basis at an individual healthcare facility.
Current infectious disease reporting systems typically wait until the diagnosis of a specific disease before the care provider reports to the public health department. Crucial time is also lost from when a test is reported as positive to its report reaching the physician who ordered it. Many possible bioterrorism agents do not present with specific symptoms in the early stages of the disease and therefore are difficult to identify. This means that care providers have to wait until the disease has progressed to advanced stages before they report to the local health department. Given the contagious nature of many targeted diseases and the potential threat of cross contamination from biological agents, the early identification of biological attacks is imperative. The ability to quarantine or decontaminate exposed populations thereby preventing further dissemination of harmful agents will be greatly facilitated by the use of active surveillance and monitoring.
Last year, there were approximately 100 million emergency room visits in the United States. Therefore, each of the approximately 4,200 emergency rooms received on average of 66 visits per day, with some larger emergency departments at academic medical centers and major trauma centers experiencing greater than 150 visits per day. If the scope of surveillance is expanded to include physicians' offices, walk-in clinics, laboratory and radiological data, and hospital information systems the requirements for the successful collection of information on each patient's symptoms, become particularly challenging.
Many emergency care facilities currently participate in rudimentary active surveillance programs. These programs typically involve paper-based surveys that are faxed to a central county location for manual tabulation. In addition to their time consuming nature, paper-based surveys greatly reduce the ability to query discrete data elements, limit the ability to change the data elements collected in response to a new event, and are much more open to errors due to manual recording, tabulation and data entry.
For an active surveillance system to succeed, it must have the following characteristics: real time data collection, low burden of data entry and maintenance on healthcare providers, ability to dynamically respond to new information, ability to collect data from a wide range of settings (ERs, clinics, physicians' offices, laboratories, hospital information systems etc.), ability to aggregate data across jurisdictions and regions, ability to collect incrementally more information about high-risk patients, two way communication capabilities to provide immediate feedback and education to front-line healthcare providers. The invention described below enables public health officials do this in an inexpensive and convenient manner. In addition, the system may be used to automate components of standard hospital procedures/protocols, and save precious time to detection in case of the unfortunate occurrence of such an event.